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10 quotes on Obamacare

Kentucky reacts to Obamacare rollout

The range of issues and potential issues runs the gamut, from the truly glitchy — the small and likely solvable — to much more serious threats to the viability of the health exchanges at the heart of Obamacare.

White House officials insist all will work once the website is up, running and easy to use. But the intensity of the national focus on the website has saved them from having to answer questions about other potentially damaging issues that have arisen either outside the virtual confines of healthcare.gov or in conjunction with troubled portal.

Consumers are suffering from sticker shock; a major cross-section of previously insured Americans are finding out that their plans are changing to conform with Obamacare even though the president promised they wouldn’t; evidence of customer satisfaction is anecdotal; and there’s still no guarantee that the young “invincibles,” who must make up 20 percent to 30 percent of the pool to make the exchanges work, will actually enroll.

“You have to bust a myth that they’re young invincibles and they don’t want it,” one senior White House official said. “That’s just not true based on the data.”

But right now, it’s not clear that the administration will be able to get enough young and healthy people to sign up for insurance through the exchanges to make the program work, and the piece of the law designed to drive those folks into the insurance market — a tax for non-compliance under the individual mandate — is becoming politically untenable even for some Democrats.

The new market rules in Obamacare take effect in January — blocking plans from charging people with pre-existing conditions more than the healthy and charging women more than men, and limiting how much more older people can be charged than younger ones.

Supporters say the new rules will make the market more fair, opening it up to people with pre-existing conditions and eliminating discrimination based on gender. But the changes come at a price.

And while subsidies are available to offset the costs to lower income people, individuals making more than $46,000 or a family of four bringing home $94,000, bear the full brunt of the new prices. The big reveal has shocked some consumers, especially the healthy ones who had relatively affordable insurance before and make too much money to get subsidized coverage next year.

The White House has put out a report on premiums that found 60 percent of people getting coverage under Obamacare next year will pay premiums of less than $100 per month. That includes those who enroll in Medicaid – the health program for the poor — and pay very little.

The premiums came in “lower than expected,” beating earlier government projections, which the administration welcomed. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re low.

Some consumers who don’t have insurance are just finding out now that the fine will pale in comparison to the hundreds of dollars a month they would have to pay to buy coverage and deductible thresholds in the thousands of dollars. And others are discovering that they make too much money to qualify for subsidies.

“There’s been a whole lot of emphasis on what’s going on with the website, but there’s been a lot less on the people who aren’t going to get subsides,” said Jennifer Beason, an insurance broker in the Atlanta area. “Their rates are going through the roof.”

Then there are consumers who simply believe it’s unfair to make them pay a tax for not buying insurance on a website that doesn’t work.

White House officials insist the main impediment is the website — not the basic pricing construct — and that young, healthy folks will sign up in droves once the bugs are driven from the system.

In fact, all of these things weigh against what’s the ultimate measure of the success of the law: Can the administration enroll an estimated 7 million people by the end of March — and will they be the right mix of young healthy folks and older sicker types?

Before the exchanges launched, insurers made predictions on enrollment, and priced their premiums accordingly. Low enrollment, or a disproportionately large number of sickly people, would be devastating.